The debate is taking place in Portugal. These days, the famous linguist Fernando Venâncio published a book called ‘Assim Nasceu uma Língua’, in which he argues that “in a few decades, the language spoken in Brazil will be called Brazilian”.

“There is no way to go back, there is no way to stop this process of separation between Portugal and Brazil,” Venâncio was quoted as saying on the BBC, leading us to wonder if something similar could happen to the Spanish.

What’s going on at Lusophony? Nothing new, really. As Carlos Fioravanti says, analysis of old texts clearly shows that the Portuguese spoken in Brazil began to differentiate at least four centuries ago. When José Simões of the University of Sao Paulo analyzed ‘Memorias para a história da capitania de São Vicente’ (a 1793 text written by a Brazilian and later “rewritten” by a Portuguese), he found more than 30 differences between the American and European dialects.

For highly political reasons, during the first half of the 20th century both Portugal and Brazil began independent processes of “spelling standardization” (the first in 1911 and the second in 1928). The general principles were the same, but the differences were considerable. And they went even further.

By 1980, this situation led the Lisbon Academy of Sciences and the Brazilian Academy of Letters to begin a negotiation that lasted ten years and led to the creation of an international agreement by all Portuguese-speaking countries, in which they committed to developing a unified orthography. In 2009, this orthography came into force.

Ours is impossible. But according to Venâncio, this has not prevented the different variants from continuing to separate. In recent years, Brazilian influence on peninsular Portuguese has increased a lot, but it is not enough to stop the separation. “There is no way to go back, there is no way to stop this process of separation between Portugal and Brazil,” the linguist explained.

From their perspective, although the language of culture remains very similar in the two countries (and throughout the Lusophony), the reality is that the ‘spontaneous’ and the ‘popular’ language are drifting apart. “Portuguese promises to one day divide or multiply into other languages, as happened to the Romansh language,” he writes in the book. The question is when: Venâncio speaks of “a few decades,” while Simões and his team believe it will take at least 200 years.

So will this only be available in Portuguese? This is a question that has been bothering the major international languages ​​for years. First of all, although the situation has changed a lot and new information technologies have made possible an unprecedented ‘linguistic coexistence’, tensions remain. A good example of this is Spanish.

As a result of its rapid standardization (Nebrija’s grammar is considered one of the first in the world – if not the first -) and the (always controversial) efforts of the early Ibero-American republics to make Spanish the language of their countries, the language has remained fairly unified. To understand the differences, it is enough to compare the year the spelling of Portuguese was unified (2009) with the spelling of Spanish (1927).

But as I said, there are tensions. In 2004, when the ‘Dictionary of Mexicans’ of the Mexican Academy of Languages ​​was being prepared, Felipe Garrido (deputy director of the same institution) argued that “this would mean a greater progress towards linguistic independence, which would allow us to value the differences between the Mexican Languages, the Mexican version according to the original Spanish”.

And in fact, in regions like Chile or Argentina, debates about the relationship between local varieties and standard Spanish have been intense for decades.

Moreover, we are seeing huge changes in the way all Spanish speakers speak; we don’t know where this will take us, but it does suggest that a new combined language variety is emerging, currently called “Latino-Spanish.”

What if we talk about ‘Hispanic American’? Because perhaps this is the future we are heading towards: a future in which the ‘Latin linguistic coiné’ has become the cultured and prestigious language. This is not a linguistic fiction: an example of this happened just a few months ago at the last edition of the International Congress of the Spanish Language, held in Cádiz, where many speakers argued that it was time to rethink the name of the language. Martín Caparrós spoke of ‘Ñamericano’ and Juan Villoso of ‘Hispano-American’ as names that would better suit the current reality of the language.

It is very possible that it is. But beyond the historical debates, it is clear that this is a debate that we will see more and more often.

Image | LBM1948

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